April 14, 2011

Man I’m getting old. It seems just like yesterday that I was having my eighth birthday party. I remember I got a SegaGamegear for that birthday, and as a result wanted to play with it rather than my classmates invited by my mother. I’m not sure why my parents thought that my classmates were the ones I wanted over. Perhaps the reason exists in that strange area of parent logic where the child can complain about something and the parents say, “Nonsense, it’ll be good for you.” “But I hate them!” “It’ll be good for you!”

Anyway, since 2006 I’ve been doing these birthday daylogs as a time capsule to preserve whatever was on my mind at the time. They’ve ranged from quick blurbs to extensive diatribes. Since this is also my one hundredth node I thought for this one I would do a…

100 Node Retrospective!

HORRAH! FANFARE!

Below in chronological order are thoughts on each one of the nodes I’ve written, along with anything I can recall about their genesis. For factual nodes these may be short for fictional they may be a bit longer.

This is my first node, or rather the first one that didn’t get deleted. It’s also the first node that I wrote while not being in a drunken stupor. At the time I was working at JC Penny’s Optical department, a job I would recommend to anyone who wants to lose a lot of faith in humanity very quickly. I do remember that checking the lenses on the Lensometer was very entertaining, about the only thing in that job that was, and had I gotten paid whatever pittance minimum wage was back then for just that I’d have been very happy. Alas, the job mostly consisted of dealing with hostile customers buying most of our products on credit.

Luner magic is a computer program I have great familiarity with. Back before I knew about E2, I was a prominent member of the Super Mario World hacking community. I eventually left because I found that I was maturing and that particular community was not (going on to their forums now I see they still haven’t improved and now that I don’t know anybody in the community anymore I doubt I’ll ever return).

I’ve always been dissatisfied with this node. It could have been longer, better, etc. Factual nodes always do better on E2 than fictional or poetry or anything else really and I really wanted to follow the success of Lensometer with something factual and this was the only subject I could come up with at the time. I may go back and expand it. The program in question has been updated multiple times since 2005 and a comprehensive features list could be fun to write. I’d probably have this node nuked before I wrote the new version if only so that people would actually see the new version.

This is still my most popular writeup, probably because this is a site for writers and if writers love to do anything it is to talk about writing. It has 12 C!s which is more than any other writeup I’ve ever done and a reputation of about eighty. The novel I talk about in the writeup has been canceled. I’ve since moved on to more stable projects including two novels which are substantial better if not infinitely so.

An example of why I didn’t particularly like working at JC Penny. Not much to say here except that the woman was an exception. I only remember two examples of where people grossly in the wrong have apologized to the person they wronged and this was one of them.

A really short node about a problem that has diminished in recent years probably because of New Mexico’s last governor, a man who wanted to pimp us to the rest of you all. During his tenure he took out ads on TV and billboards across the country, including a very large one of himself in New York City. He also ran for president and I think you can guess how that turned out.

Real ID has been implemented. I’ll be getting my first Real ID scary “We Scan Your Face” bullshit next month because my higher quality state driver’s license will expire then. If congress were really concerned about the Republic they’d have whoever came up with this idea hung as a traitor, but since it was they themselves who came up with it I doubt we’ll ever see that happen.

A story written in the 9th grade and man can you tell. As a story it isn’t that bad, but it isn’t very original and there’s something unquestionably juvenile about it. My response below about the teacher also strikes me as juvenile. I’ve long since passed the ARRRG! TEACHERS ARE STUPID phase of my life and now if a teacher or boss acts stupid I simply deal with it.

I really like this node. Not only is it informative, but humorous too. Judging from the votes most people like it too. Every once in awhile I go back and update the XP and level that I mention in the writeup to keep it semi-current.

Ah. The first of my Emperor Stevens nodes. (Emperor Stevens is a mocking exaggeration on the sort of ridiculous political ideas I held in middle school and early high school.) The first Emperor Stevens node is The Leviathan Penile Counting Machine by futilelord. We created the character late one night in his mother’s garage over a board game as I recall. Noders seem to like these stories, so I keep doing them. The type of humor in them is a special type of humor I hold close to my heart: the humor of the absurd. Of course, Paving America wouldn’t work, of course Canada would try to stop us, of course if you actually paved America you’d heat up the Earth. Anyway, I’ve seen some catbox conjecture that the story is some sort of critique on American consumerism, and it may well be, but if it is I didn’t design it that way on purpose.

Hey! A Daily Evil. Remember when those were common? Remember when jessicapierce came down hard on that fellow for posting something that was actually evil? Remember how they petered out? I don’t miss them, but they were very popular for awhile.

This is probably my most useful node. If you are about to purchase glasses read it. It will help you out.

It should be obvious that this comes from my experience with JC Penny Optical. I find it interesting to see just how much of this information I’ve forgotten since I quit five years ago. My twenty year-old ass could school my twenty-six year-old self. At least in eyeglass knowledge. Though I’d probably give my current self 20-1 odds in a bar fight against my squirrelly 145 pound past self.

I love this videogame. It got me when I was young, you see, and has never let me go. I recently read a review of this game by a modern reviewer who said he thought the graphics were terrible. Of course they are when compared to Modern Warfare 7000, dickwad. And by God, I know that when I play Super Mario 3 all I am like is “Well, this is pretty good, but fucking hell. Mario Galaxy 2 has much better graphics. Gonna have to shave at least half a star off of its score.” Shit.

I still maintain my opinion on cosplayers despite having become in the interval from this node to now the god-emperor of the UNM Anime Club. Incidentally, the club is having a cosplay contest this Saturday. I’m going to be missing it because I will be drunk on birthday shenanigans.

Despite the four C!s I’ve never really liked this node. It’s honest about the way I feel about porn, but it is nowhere near comprehensive enough to show that while I have no moral problem with porn I do have an objection to how strange it is. Do men really like women to masturbate them with their breasts? What the hell is with come shots? I suppose the real problem is that the industry reveals that men are deeply threatened by women's sexually and must overcome that fear by putting women down in sexualize media. I have no moral problem with this, but let’s be honest about what we’re doing, okay?

A story about a girl lost somewhere in time and space. I like the story, but I’ll probably never finish it. This was my first attempt at a longer fictional narrative on E2 and I must say that the result is… meh. The story is fine, but fiction never does that well on E2 and sometimes I wonder if posting it is even worth it. Poetry does worse, of course. Awhile back, I helped ushdiwhatever do a statistical analysis on how well each category did vote-wise on the database. Recipes did the best as I recall.

That recipes do so well isn’t that surprising. Neither is that fiction does poorly. Food is a commitment nearly everyone is willing to upvote while fiction doesn’t always deliver the goods. So to ask a person to spend thirty or more minutes on a piece that, ultimately was never finished, is a bit much. I’ll put the Kira nodes down for a-nuking when I can replace them with something better.

Now this is humor done right. I have since used excerpts from this article to fill in a fictitious blog on toilet humor for a creative writing class. It went well over there too. I’ll note that a line from this story is included in Jet-Poop’s Favorite Everything quotes.

Now somebody, The Custodian, I think, wrote a really excellent node about how Everything is not a good venue for fiction. I thought I had chinged it, but I apparently have not and so can’t find it.

But the point is well taken. When I post a factual I get around 35 votes either up or down. When I post a humorous piece I get about the same unless it gets C!ed a whole bunch and then I get twice as much. When I post fiction I usually get a spread of about +12/-2 for a grand total of 14 votes. Now, I know that this is sometimes because the story itself isn’t good, though I’m inclined to think that this isn’t always the case because most of my fiction nodes get 3 to 4 C!s and very positive comments from those who do read them. I therefore assume that people just don’t read fiction here unless it is from exceptionally good noders.

So, maybe E2 isn’t the place for fiction. Ah well. I’ll continue to post stuff as long as the site survives (and it’s lasted a damn slight longer than some of its naysayers have said).

Another Emperor Stevens story. This one plays off of America’s love of often ill-informed interventionalism. This one comes from a late night conversation with futilelord about the fuel costs of such a venture. It eventually devolved into America forcing the poor Ugandans to accept all of the water from Georgia and South Carolina. Can you tell this was written during the Bush years?

This story covers the subject of immortality far better than the damn FAQ. It’s not a great story, but I still like the characters. The line “The moon is bright and the road a river with snowy banks and visible vapor,” is probably the best part of the whole thing. I’ll probably crib it for something else eventually.

This is rather popular, heavens knows why. It is a typed version of a journal that I kept from about 2001 to 2006 the purpose of which was to see how my writing changed while on various substances. That never really happened because substances are hard to come by when you’re broke. The majority of it was written under the influence of Puerto Rican rum (I forget the brand). A few however were written on other stuff. Pesek 16th to 18th, the unreadable pages, were written on Benadryl, some of the poetry comes from chainsmoking datura cigarettes. There’s DXM in there and at least one light dose of mushrooms. The hardcopy claims at one point to be a product of LSD but no LSD was used in its making.

What I like most about The Voyage of the Roofer Boonhurst is that despite its absurd method of composition, strange repetitiveness, lack of round characters, etc, etc, etc, is that it is a coherent story. To wit: A group of crazies are sent out into a desert/ocean by order of an emperor on a magic shopping cart (the Roofer Boonhurst). Along the way the Master of the Oars dies and comes back as “the Slain Oars Master” (a pun of Whore Master, apparently). The Oars Master chases the crew around the ocean until the captain of the shopping cart decides to head home. When they get there, they find their island nation is under attack. So, they fight off all of the enemy ships, the Oars Master is finally defeated and then the crew wins awards as if they were achievements in a bad videogame.

So, if E2 isn’t a venue for fiction, where would one go on the internet to find one? Well, nowhere. Other writing sites I’ve tried come off as extended workshop classes and those are universally useless. What I really want to do is reach as large an audience as possible and while the internet makes it easy to publish it does not make it easy to attract readers. In a conversation with a very popular noder of fiction who happens to have his own site, he told me that despite having a page on TV Tropes, his main story doesn’t get the same number of hits his technical or geeky articles do. Which is too bad because the story is really good and probably should be published.

I can offer no solutions to the problem of attracting an audience online. Webcomics do fantastically well as do amateur videos, but literature doesn’t. Maybe it’s because of the format. Maybe people want to lay down in a comfy chair to read a story and that’s hard to do with the internet (at least before the Kindle).

This one is a giant info dump. It’s a record of all the nodes I voted on in October 2007 and boy howdy did it take a lot of work. The amount of time recording votes is the only thing stopping me from doing it again. It’s a lot of work. I do wish that other noders would try this though. It would be very interesting to get to know a few other noders voting habits… for science!

A writeup for the ‘07 Brevity Quest. Poor D.W. Griffith, he was very talented filmmaker, but unfortunately for him he’ll always be remembered as the racist son of a bitch who made Birth of a Nation. So, let that be a lesson for you artists. If you want to create lasting work try not to let your prejudices affect your legacy.

Oh God. This writeup. I wrote this after the two-word poem writeups really began to take off. I stated quite frankly that I wasn’t impressed with them because it takes no talent to string a pair of neat sounding words together. Get bent, find rend, see Kent, burn lint, burn rubber, and pejorative apostasy to name a few. I was irritated by the writeups, posted my opinion on it, and then went about my day.

When I returned to E2 the next day I had received a private message from a female noder who will remain antonymous saying that I had really hurt her feelings with my comment on the two-word poems and that I had no right to hurt her feelings. I responded with the usual “Didn’t mean to hurt any feelings, I just don’t like the two-word poems and was voicing an opinion.” The next message I got from her basically said “Well, then you have no right to express your opinion especially if it would be hurtful.” I didn’t take kindly to that and for the next several days we exchanged messages of increasing nastiness until finally we broke off contact with mutual fuck you’s.

This still bothers me because I believe that I have the right to voice any opinion I chose regardless of what that opinion might do to another’s feelings. If a person voices any opinion often enough he or she is bound to find somebody offended by it, but if that person decides that is significant reason not to voice an opinion they will soon find that they have no opinions at all and that the people with opinions will dominate them forever. So, I guess my answer is still fuck off, I’ll say what I want. Sorry, I hurt your feelings, and while I never hated the two-word poems I still think they are insipid, uncreative drivel and my right to say so trumps your right to not be offend, which isn’t a right recognized in any legal document that I am aware of. Sorry, but this is what I think and you can’t make me unthink it or rescind it.

This is a review of an Avatar the Last Airbender episode. Originally, I planned to node the entire show, but that quickly proved to be very difficult due to the time it takes to review each one properly.

This would probably be my most popular humorous node. The idea for this comes from a real incident. The friend who is “moving away” was actually only visiting. I had a funny little impromptu speech about the dangers of Australia that stuck in my head for several months until it came out as the writeup you see before you. Interestingly, it also seems to be popular among Australian noders.

Now that I reread it, I think this review is pretty accurate. The camera does protect the people who hold it. If the death were really dictated by random chance then you risk having the cameraman die and then the rest of the movie is the camera staring at the ground. Not very entertaining.

By-the-by, I hate spoiler tags. Now, I suppose there shouldn’t be any spoilers for a review and quite a lot of them in analyses. Since this writeup is an analyses mislabeled as a review, I suppose the tag is justified, but… damn I still hate it.

The title here is a cruel, cruel joke on the poor smuck who is about to get zapped. The original writeup and node was by Mr. ushdfgakjasgh and was instantly zapped. I liked the title because it was perfect for the then untitled story. So I recreated the nodeshell and stuck the node in.

An Emperor Stevens story. Like most of them this idea comes from late night discussions with futile lord after the “heartbreak hill” section of the night has passed and dawn is sticking her rosy fingers into our minds and giving them a good squeeze. The idea is simple: Cybernetic Zombies whose programming is not integrated with their fleshy parts. The results are hilarious.

Based on an idea by Hyphenated, the idea was that this type of node could catch on like the two-word poem did. Obviously it did not, which is a shame because as writers I would have thought this a subject we could all write at least a blurb about.

Even with 42 upvotes and 3 C!s I think this node is underrated. I really enjoy this joke if only because I got to look up absurd units of measurement. I am fairly sure the recipe is actually impossible to make, but if anybody manages to make it, please let me know.

I also like how this recipe is mixed in with real recipes. That node has a lot of good writeups in it.

I remember this day! Man, that was one of the busiest days of my life. The hot Asian chick bit probably needs explaining. Basically, it was a communication breakdown. I was supposed to meet them at a bowling alley, but I thought I was supposed to meet them at one of their houses. Get to the house, nobody there. You get the idea.

In the case of Fear the Cold, the idea was to start with an expanded world view and gradually shrink it. First we start with the house, then the bedroom, then the bed, and then the mind. It’s supposed to be creepy. Hopefully it works.

This is not a true story, at least not in part. When I was younger I did take long walks at night and I saw some pretty strange stuff, but never a ghost and certainly not her ghost. Incidentally, there are no good representations of her on the internet and finding stories on her is pretty hard even in Zimmerman Library, the largest library in the State of New Mexico.

This is a very strange little thing written almost immediately after Fear the Cold. I have no idea what it is about except that it has something to do with keeping people in boxes and graphing guns to their faces.

If you’ve not watched this you really have no idea how bad it is. But my statement about it being forgotten quickly does seem to be true. In just two years you almost never hear anything about it. That’s really the punishment for these hacks. To be forgotten utterly except by period scholars dredging film libraries.

With this story I wanted to see if I could use a lot of made-up words and still come across as intelligible. The story itself isn’t that great, but the words are fun. Sometimes I think they’re a little too obtuse, but other times I think they work very well indeed.

A collaboration between Rapscallion, tkeiser, and myself spawned from a catbox conversation. It turns out, if you really want to know, that the name “Randy Puma” seems to come from internet celebrity ZeFrank in context to a name he gives to an anonymous sportsracer. But I think I like our Randy Puma better. Just not his singing.

I don’t generally write book reviews because I do enough of that for school and with the name “BookReader” it might be even expected. But this is a good book and I think people should at least check it out.

Another birthday. As some might know, I sometimes put riddles up on my homenode. This birthday log shows the answers to some of them. Riddling fascinates me, but I’ve never been good at solving them. Making them is easier, but still requires that you make sure that the answer you want is the only interpretation that can be achieved through the clues.

An interesting question. But not one I will plum right now. This is a node I’m surprised didn’t get nuked. It certainly would have back in the Old E2 days. Or maybe not. I wasn’t as well known back then and the survival of nodes I consider to be inferior after looking at them later might be a result of editors being less willing to nuke well known noders’ nodes. Certain noders, and I won’t name names, do get prissy when their stuff is nuked. This is particularly bad with poetry and I remember one incident where a noder who should have known better started a huge row over one of his nodes getting deleted. In more paranoid states I sometimes wonder if that incident lead to a decrease in editorial power on this site and thus to a decrease in the quality of our content.

This is an informative node about Donginger, the hostile robot who was eventually put down for rabies. I feel guilty that the bot is gone because it was my insult that he used that got him borged for the final time. Ah well.

Taken has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I still loath it even today. It’s a bad film with no redeeming qualities. I’ve run across a few people who have argued this with me as if the film was good, but with such shitty writing it isn’t a very tenable position. Any dialogue that goes on longer than four words is completely unstable and unconvincing. But really, a movie like Taken isn’t about dialogue it’s about ignominious mental masturbation in the form of perverse violence. I don’t think it makes the world a worse place by existing, but I do think it makes people worse for having watched it.

I’m very proud of my dialogue, but always nervous about my descriptions. I seem to have the opposite problem of most writers who say that dialogue is the hardest part of storytelling (and judging from most fiction books I’d say they’re probably right). I almost never have trouble with dialogue and almost always have to rewrite descriptive passages. So, it is a nice break when I get to do a story that’s nothing but dialogue.

Even though this story is flawed in both ending and conflict, it is still one of my favorites. I love the overall feeling of the story.

The characters, by the way, are both from my fantasy novel as this was originally written as backstory. I had to cut it for pacing reasons, but I realized it could almost stand alone on its own and so I retooled it a little bit and put it on E2 after the urging of a fellow noder I had shown it to.

An Emperor Stevens story. I really like this one although you could say it has some disagreeable parts. It is even more disturbing if you realize that the emperor character is basically me making fun of my teenage self, who would have been perfectly for all of the political opinions expressed by the establishment in these stories. So, when the emperor is naked… well, yeah, guess whose nuts are on display.

It would be really nice if game designers followed something like this. More or less, this is a collection of my worst pet peeves in videogames and an attempt to explain why they are irksome and should be removed.

This is an interesting movie. It shouldn’t be as bad as it is, and it isn’t as bad as people would make you believe. It just stumbles so hard in the wrong places. Poor movie. It looks like it could have been good.

Almost every bit of feedback I’ve seen from this writeup suggests that people either agree with me on this issue or that while flip-flops might be bad Uggs are worse. Before posting this, I didn’t even know what an Ugg was. Now I do, and they are pretty bad, but I still insist the flip-flops are worse because of the sound they make.

If you’re wondering why I spell flip-flop with a hyphen in the title but without the hyphen in the article, I have no idea. I would think it to be flip-flop rather than flipflop but I suppose either works and why be a stickler about that issue when I can be a stickler about the way “e-mail” is hyphenated.

One of the largest problems with posting longer fiction on E2 is that nobody reads it. That can be kind of frustrating when you post something that you think is really good and the few who do read send you messages raving about how good it is. I’m not sure if this piece I submitted for last year’s horror quest is really as good as my inbox says, but I do really feel frustrated that this only has seventeen votes on it.

Of course, it might be equally foolish of me to expect anybody to see this complaint being as it is near the bottom of an extremely long writeup.

This is a modification of a paper on Twain I did last semester. Basically I took a B+ paper and made it a C-, which disturbingly wasn’t that hard to do. I’m almost always surprised how many Bs I get on papers considering that I spend about two minutes on every page and don’t bother to polish them or even proofread them.